I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, page 11
The first time Nina and I met for a drink four years ago we went to an outdoor bar along the river, a short distance from Notre-Dame, just off the wide walking path thronged with tourists. It had been her choice, and I’d assumed it was a measure of how little she really knew Paris. It felt to me like asking someone to dinner in Times Square. But actually, it turned out that I was the one who didn’t understand. The carafes of rosé were regularly priced and there were plenty of Parisians there, perhaps more Parisians than not. It was the first time it occurred to me Paris is not demarcated by tourists the way New York is, with prices doubling in concert with people’s increasing lack of awareness of their space. Parisians use Paris the way serious hunters I knew in Wyoming used the entire carcass of the beast they’d just struck down; they do not leave the good parts for scavengers.
Tonight, the Seine is seemingly entirely French. Blankets spread out, prime spots under trees already secured. Everywhere cigarette smoke and open bottles of wine.
* * *
• • •
Ellie and Aarti are already here. They’ve marked out a spot across the pathway that separates us from the river, under a tree whose roots are upending the cobblestone. We are only a few feet from the stone wall that rises high above us to the street. The wall is where men come to pee when the lineup for the porta-potty is too long, and sometimes even when it’s not. Ellie is frustrated there is no space closer to the river, but it seems everyone left in Paris has come down here tonight.
I’m wearing a red cotton tank dress I bought a few days earlier at Monoprix for twelve euros. Few of the outfits I hauled across the ocean, and sweatily lugged up the stairs, have left the apartment. Even the rose gold Birks I almost never take off at home have remained in my flat. It only took one long walk to dinner in the 9th on my third night before I scurried to buy a pair of the omnipresent white tennis shoes. How had I not understood their attractiveness before? Or is it just the comfort of doing what everyone else is doing. I may not speak the actual language, but I can participate thusly. These shoes are what I have on now, with thin white socks underneath also purchased at Monoprix. None of the selves I’d spent more than a year envisioning had yet to find a place here. Currently Paris is requiring me to be only one person, and that person is currently wearing tight-fitting cheap cotton.
Sandra arrives with Marcel, red scarf tied around his neck, and a wicker picnic basket that holds a blanket, the foodstuff, utensils, and napkins. Also, a jar of kimchi. We shift into motion as if someone has flipped a switch. Spreading the blanket out, pinning the edges down with bags, or in my case, with my shoes, which I have removed. Spreading out all our wares and passing around glasses. The conversation ongoing—continued from yesterday, from last weekend—seems like the Paris light: immersive and glowing and disconnected from sharp details that pin it down. More a feeling than a narrative.
The late afternoon begins its gentle slide into evening. The crippled towers of Notre-Dame, visible in the distance, begin to glow slightly as the sky slowly shifts to a darker blue. We are halfway through the second bottle of rosé when a band sets up not far away from us. In summers past, I have often seen swing dancing accompanied by live music, farther down the Seine. But this band is not that. Something that is immediately clear when they begin playing. After cringing through a warm-up that has us questioning whether we need to pack up entirely and move to a different location, they move into nineties indie rock, drowning out our conversation. Oh god, our looks say to each other, why do dudes need to ruin everything (not entirely fair, since one of the singers appears to be a young woman). The only thing that keeps us here is the inability to summon the energy to not be here. Instead of packing up the sliced saucisson, it’s easier just to eat it. A friend of Sandra’s, a woman about our age wearing a T-shirt and jeans and the same white runners I have on, wanders by and joins us. I don’t catch her name in introductions, but she gestures back in the direction she came to suggest there is another group if we want to join them. But instead another bottle gets opened and Sandra, who is more irritated by the situation than any of us, throws her hands down on her lap in exasperation. Marcel does not like loud noises.
And the band is loud. I suppose it’s not possible to play a Soundgarden song quietly, which is what they are doing. The absurdity of it all begins to work its charm; perhaps it’s just the novelty of live music, or maybe it’s just that the musicians are clearly enjoying themselves. Soon a group gathers round. After the janky warm-up, it only takes a few songs before one person begins to move differently, and like a spark on dry tinder the small crowd bursts forth together; the clapping turns to dancing, and as the sky moves from sapphire into gold, turning the waters into thin strokes of fire, we find ourselves adjacent to a full-blown dance party that is soon blocking the wide pathway. Actually, I can’t tell if the crowd is blocking the path or if, like a strangely angled branch in a stream, the dancers are just collecting passersby. Certainly, no one seems like they want to move on. The energy is contagious. Small children climb out of passing strollers, cyclists shrug off their irritation at having their path blocked and dismount, joining the swaying crowd with one hand on their handlebars. Joggers stop and bounce in place.
As though I’m a cartoon character floating away on an enticing scent, I rise and walk across the cobblestones in my cheap red dress and socks. Ellie comes with me, and together we join the circle and slide into the music.
It feels like my first drink of water after a long trek across the desert. Like plunging into a cool lake after a day of sweat and grime. I have missed touch, yes, and I have missed conversation, and I have missed being with my friends. But the energy of so many people moving together is something I didn’t know I wanted. It’s intoxicating. More than that. It’s ecstatic. In the original sense of the word, which is derived from the Greek verb existanai, meaning “entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place.” Proper or otherwise, I have been removed. And right now, I’m in the only place I want to be. I feel as though I am in a state of rapture. I am fully and completely in my own body in a way I have not been in such a long time, I wonder right now if there was ever really a time that I was.
Almost immediately, I lose Ellie in the crowd but it doesn’t matter. No one is leaving without telling me. We are all women accustomed to moving about the world on our own, and as such keep strong trained eyes on one another even from great distances. From across oceans. But also, practically, I know my way home. I always know my way home from wherever I am, and at the moment I’m approximately an eighteen-minute walk from my bed.
Soon even these minor thoughts are pushed out of my head by the beat and the bodies. Nirvana. 4 Non Blondes. I wonder if the people playing these songs were even alive when they were played on the radio or if they are simply trying to connect themselves to a time where the norm was to be in only one place at one time.
And then somehow amidst the crowd there is just one body.
I’m dancing with a tall, muscular man. He’s wearing a red tank top that matches my dress and shows off his bulging arms. He’s in khaki shorts and silver high-top runners. I move toward him and then spin away, twirling around the other dancers with the music, but each time I seem to find myself back in his sphere. Soon he takes my hand and tries to slip into a proper dance with me. I laugh and shake my head. I can’t dance. I think of the ranch in Wyoming where I spent the month of August the year I turned forty. The girls who worked there were taught square dancing from a young age and I would watch them fly across the floor, spinning and kicking, always knowing what their partner would do and where they would be. I’m envious of the skill. I’ve never learned any kind of dance, and even if I had, I question whether it would have made much difference. I only ever seem to be coordinated on a bike, or in the water; the rest of the time I’m clumsy and awkward, barely managing to walk a straight line on the sidewalk.
But he persists and I slide my phone under my left bra strap, so I have both hands free, shrug off my ingrained concerns, and lean into his body, and into the music, and somewhat miraculously we manage to move into a coordinated rhythm. Or at least that’s what it feels like. His hands move to my back, pressing and guiding me, and then they eventually (or immediately…I have become entirely disconnected from the clock) slide lower, landing firmly on either hip. I turn my head up and, as if guided by some force disconnected from my brain, my own hands move under his shirt, and I feel the sweaty muscles undulating to the music. And then eventually, or immediately, we are kissing. Somewhere, very far back in my brain, moving further even as it tries to make itself heard, a small, deeply unconvincing voice wants me to know that kissing strangers in a pandemic that is fast moving into a worrisome second wave is not responsible behavior. But I am hurtling away from that voice, or it from me, too quickly for it to make any impact. I have been careful for a year. What I am aware of are his hands on my body, slipping further down, and then the small voice disappears entirely. Along with it, as though sucked into a black hole, disappears any awareness of myself from the outside. Gone are all the reflections of myself I have depended on for the last year, what feels like an eternity. Gone is the understanding of myself from the me I see looking back. Gone is the me who existed to so many loved ones only from the neck up, in a square box staring back at me from a screen. I am fully inside myself and only looking out. I don’t care how I appear, only how I feel, and I feel fucking fantastic right now.
Eventually my dance partner and I manage some broken conversation through the music and the kissing and the touching and the groping. He is from Senegal. He likes dancing. I’m from New York. I’m in Paris en vacances pour un mois.
This is the sum total of information we exchange in our time together. I guess his age at around thirty, give or take. We return to our bodies.
Sometime after midnight the band stops playing, and the crowd begins to disperse. From the corner of my eye, I’m vaguely aware of my group packing up our things. There is a sliver of moon high over the now dark water. The black silhouette of Notre-Dame is barely visible against the sky.
My dance partner conveys to me he might be going dancing at another club in the 13th. I’m not going with him. Even through the fog of rosé and the high of our dancing, I shirk from the idea of having to find a new way home, especially through the fog of rosé. This has been delightful, I’m happy to go home. We kiss goodbye. And then again. And again. His hands sliding from my neck, down to my thighs, and then back up again. I slide mine into his hair, pulling him closer, until even after midnight on the Seine we are verging on the obscene. I pull out my phone from where it is still wedged in my bra strap, the screen dripping with my own sweat.
“WhatsApp?” I say to him.
He looks skeptical, but when I hand him the phone, he enters his number.
“Merci.” I kiss him. “I will message,” I say.
He nods. I can tell he’s not convinced. I’m not convinced either, but it feels wonderful to have options.
“His hands were all over you!” Sandra’s friend tells me when I finally return to our blanket and push my swollen feet, socks filthy-black on the bottom now, into my waiting tennis shoes.
Her tone cuts through the fog of ecstasy I am in, suggesting I should…be scandalized? Feel shame? At the very least I should be embarrassed. I recognize it immediately as my own voice coming to greet me from other times and places when I’d admonished friends for doing things that deep down I wished I was doing. Or even just wished I was capable of doing. I don’t know Sandra’s friend at all, but I understand what she really means is: I’m scared to do the thing you just did, and you doing it made me have to think about that.
“That’s exactly where I wanted them to be,” I say with a smile.
This, I think, is what maturity actually means most of the time. It has little to do with growing away from the things that bring us pleasure or joy or just silly fun. It most often just means kindness. Knowing how to give it, to ourselves and others, and also receive it. In this instance, this is not a challenge since I’m so high on the sensation of my entire body being alive I cannot feel anything but good. Beyond good, I feel great. I’m surprised by how powerful I feel. I got what I wanted, or allowed what I wanted to get me.
Nina and I walk home, still swaying to the music. When she drops me off, I tell her to text me as soon as she’s in. We’ve done this so many times together. Upstairs I lie on the floor. Whatever remained of my rational brain a short while ago, the one that thought the dancing and kissing and touching were enough, has gone as silent as the cautionary voice in my head that made its feeble stand earlier. I don’t regret not going dancing somewhere in the 13th, but I’m not done with the night. I swipe through my Fruitz messages to see if there’s potential for some fun chat. There are a slew of messages waiting for me, but immediately I realize I want more. I want the real thing. I decide I should message my dance partner. Even through the high of the evening this feels a bit insane. Does one message a stranger from the dance floor? Isn’t it enough to know I could message him? I consider this for a few minutes. It is not. We’ve all been living in a place of balancing risk against caution for what feels like a long time, and very little feels like enough right now. I open WhatsApp and type:
“Come over?”
The worst that can happen is he says no, I think as I hit send.
The response is immediate.
“Où es-tu?”
I send the address before my brain has a chance to reemerge. I know what I want.
“En route. Dix minutes.”
“Bien,” I type. The sensation of being wanted immediately. I get up to brush my teeth. My stomach churning through the wine at the imminent reality. My phone pings again, and a bolt of worry that he’s changed his mind shoots through me—the disappointment is telling. I’m not drunk or playing; I really do want this. But it’s not him, it’s just Nina telling me she’s home. I send back three thumbs-up emojis. I hesitate. Should I tell her? I should. But I don’t.
When I’m done brushing my teeth, I double-check that the box of condoms I brought with me is in the bedside table. Then I return to the living room and lean out the window. The streets are quiet, it’s close to 2:00 a.m. now. The night air is cool, and the city glows against the low clouds above. I turn to the left and see his figure coming down the street. I watch for a minute, alert with the power that I have summoned this. I have been summoning this for months and now it’s here. I knew what I wanted and I got it. I don’t wait for him to get to the door, or even message. We’ve already done the dance. Literally. I’ve invited him here for one reason. I take the keys, shut the door firmly behind me, and hurry down the stairs, the marble cool against my bare feet, and am at the door when he arrives. This is a New York habit, established from years of living in brownstones with no buzzers. The fact I could have just given him the front door code and simply waited at the door, eliminating any need for stilted small talk, does not register as an option, even though Aarti once told me she gives her door code to every delivery man. Between the restaurants that share access to the lobby, all the occupants of the building, and all the people they invite in, who knows how many people have this code.
In the small time we’ve been apart I’ve already forgotten how tall he is. How broad. The strong smell of too much cologne wafts off him. He follows me up the flights of stairs, not touching me. “One more étage,” I say, thinking the stairs suddenly seem endless. I wonder how this will go. Will it be awkward? No one has seen me naked for a long time. But when I close the door to the apartment, I simply turn to him, and smiling at one another, we immediately pick up where we left off. This time there is no sense of propriety slowing down the removal of my clothes. Which are immediately removed. By him.
As my dress comes off, and then my bra, I consider what my nude, forty-six-year-old body might look like to outside eyes. It does not look like the bodies we are told should be naked. It is not a defying can you believe it body. It has not fared as well as my face. It has shouldered the highs and the plunges of life, of grief, and loss, and confusion, and self-deception, and the reliable joys of food, and the months where not exercising was definitely the healthier option. It is the body of a person who can no longer skate by on no health insurance. Who must follow up on every scan. Who cannot leave home even for one night without tweezers. Who can barely conceive of wearing heels because of the pain they cause my feet.
Should I be concerned? Get under the covers first? Try to angle myself so that the fact one breast currently points in the wrong direction thanks to last year’s biopsy is less noticeable? So that the dimples down the backs of my thighs can only be felt instead of seen?
It doesn’t matter.
None of these questions need answering. The concerns disappear more quickly than they arrive. Now that I’m here, in my body and out of my head, I find I don’t care. I can’t even make myself care. I’m being carried away by all the things that get lost in a two-dimensional world where our eyes are the only way to interact with others, where all our other senses are replaced with an immediate search for “flaws.”
What gets lost in that world: The headiness of another body, the smells, the awkwardness, the vulnerability. Small puffs of air on bare skin. The presence of another person, taking up space, shifting everything in the room so that it takes on a different significance: the lumpy, detestable couch now a helpful place to balance a knee on. The doorframe a solid scaffolding to remain upright. And then, the glorious sensation of just being naked. Skin. So much skin. Hands where there haven’t been hands in…who knows how long. And more skin. More than anything I have missed the contact of skin.
I look up to see him staring at me and I catch that look on his face, the look we are relentlessly told is reserved only for the rarified who have followed the proper regime. Applied the toners and moisturizers and serums in the correct order. Lifted the right amount of weights. Done cardio for the correct amount of time. Excluded the right amount of sugar or fats or meats. Followed each set of new rules as they appear. Restricted themselves. Contorted themselves. Done the work. Remained young. It is the look of a man gazing upon a naked female body they have been invited to partake in. A mix of lust, excitement, gratitude, and relief.
Tonight, the Seine is seemingly entirely French. Blankets spread out, prime spots under trees already secured. Everywhere cigarette smoke and open bottles of wine.
* * *
• • •
Ellie and Aarti are already here. They’ve marked out a spot across the pathway that separates us from the river, under a tree whose roots are upending the cobblestone. We are only a few feet from the stone wall that rises high above us to the street. The wall is where men come to pee when the lineup for the porta-potty is too long, and sometimes even when it’s not. Ellie is frustrated there is no space closer to the river, but it seems everyone left in Paris has come down here tonight.
I’m wearing a red cotton tank dress I bought a few days earlier at Monoprix for twelve euros. Few of the outfits I hauled across the ocean, and sweatily lugged up the stairs, have left the apartment. Even the rose gold Birks I almost never take off at home have remained in my flat. It only took one long walk to dinner in the 9th on my third night before I scurried to buy a pair of the omnipresent white tennis shoes. How had I not understood their attractiveness before? Or is it just the comfort of doing what everyone else is doing. I may not speak the actual language, but I can participate thusly. These shoes are what I have on now, with thin white socks underneath also purchased at Monoprix. None of the selves I’d spent more than a year envisioning had yet to find a place here. Currently Paris is requiring me to be only one person, and that person is currently wearing tight-fitting cheap cotton.
Sandra arrives with Marcel, red scarf tied around his neck, and a wicker picnic basket that holds a blanket, the foodstuff, utensils, and napkins. Also, a jar of kimchi. We shift into motion as if someone has flipped a switch. Spreading the blanket out, pinning the edges down with bags, or in my case, with my shoes, which I have removed. Spreading out all our wares and passing around glasses. The conversation ongoing—continued from yesterday, from last weekend—seems like the Paris light: immersive and glowing and disconnected from sharp details that pin it down. More a feeling than a narrative.
The late afternoon begins its gentle slide into evening. The crippled towers of Notre-Dame, visible in the distance, begin to glow slightly as the sky slowly shifts to a darker blue. We are halfway through the second bottle of rosé when a band sets up not far away from us. In summers past, I have often seen swing dancing accompanied by live music, farther down the Seine. But this band is not that. Something that is immediately clear when they begin playing. After cringing through a warm-up that has us questioning whether we need to pack up entirely and move to a different location, they move into nineties indie rock, drowning out our conversation. Oh god, our looks say to each other, why do dudes need to ruin everything (not entirely fair, since one of the singers appears to be a young woman). The only thing that keeps us here is the inability to summon the energy to not be here. Instead of packing up the sliced saucisson, it’s easier just to eat it. A friend of Sandra’s, a woman about our age wearing a T-shirt and jeans and the same white runners I have on, wanders by and joins us. I don’t catch her name in introductions, but she gestures back in the direction she came to suggest there is another group if we want to join them. But instead another bottle gets opened and Sandra, who is more irritated by the situation than any of us, throws her hands down on her lap in exasperation. Marcel does not like loud noises.
And the band is loud. I suppose it’s not possible to play a Soundgarden song quietly, which is what they are doing. The absurdity of it all begins to work its charm; perhaps it’s just the novelty of live music, or maybe it’s just that the musicians are clearly enjoying themselves. Soon a group gathers round. After the janky warm-up, it only takes a few songs before one person begins to move differently, and like a spark on dry tinder the small crowd bursts forth together; the clapping turns to dancing, and as the sky moves from sapphire into gold, turning the waters into thin strokes of fire, we find ourselves adjacent to a full-blown dance party that is soon blocking the wide pathway. Actually, I can’t tell if the crowd is blocking the path or if, like a strangely angled branch in a stream, the dancers are just collecting passersby. Certainly, no one seems like they want to move on. The energy is contagious. Small children climb out of passing strollers, cyclists shrug off their irritation at having their path blocked and dismount, joining the swaying crowd with one hand on their handlebars. Joggers stop and bounce in place.
As though I’m a cartoon character floating away on an enticing scent, I rise and walk across the cobblestones in my cheap red dress and socks. Ellie comes with me, and together we join the circle and slide into the music.
It feels like my first drink of water after a long trek across the desert. Like plunging into a cool lake after a day of sweat and grime. I have missed touch, yes, and I have missed conversation, and I have missed being with my friends. But the energy of so many people moving together is something I didn’t know I wanted. It’s intoxicating. More than that. It’s ecstatic. In the original sense of the word, which is derived from the Greek verb existanai, meaning “entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place.” Proper or otherwise, I have been removed. And right now, I’m in the only place I want to be. I feel as though I am in a state of rapture. I am fully and completely in my own body in a way I have not been in such a long time, I wonder right now if there was ever really a time that I was.
Almost immediately, I lose Ellie in the crowd but it doesn’t matter. No one is leaving without telling me. We are all women accustomed to moving about the world on our own, and as such keep strong trained eyes on one another even from great distances. From across oceans. But also, practically, I know my way home. I always know my way home from wherever I am, and at the moment I’m approximately an eighteen-minute walk from my bed.
Soon even these minor thoughts are pushed out of my head by the beat and the bodies. Nirvana. 4 Non Blondes. I wonder if the people playing these songs were even alive when they were played on the radio or if they are simply trying to connect themselves to a time where the norm was to be in only one place at one time.
And then somehow amidst the crowd there is just one body.
I’m dancing with a tall, muscular man. He’s wearing a red tank top that matches my dress and shows off his bulging arms. He’s in khaki shorts and silver high-top runners. I move toward him and then spin away, twirling around the other dancers with the music, but each time I seem to find myself back in his sphere. Soon he takes my hand and tries to slip into a proper dance with me. I laugh and shake my head. I can’t dance. I think of the ranch in Wyoming where I spent the month of August the year I turned forty. The girls who worked there were taught square dancing from a young age and I would watch them fly across the floor, spinning and kicking, always knowing what their partner would do and where they would be. I’m envious of the skill. I’ve never learned any kind of dance, and even if I had, I question whether it would have made much difference. I only ever seem to be coordinated on a bike, or in the water; the rest of the time I’m clumsy and awkward, barely managing to walk a straight line on the sidewalk.
But he persists and I slide my phone under my left bra strap, so I have both hands free, shrug off my ingrained concerns, and lean into his body, and into the music, and somewhat miraculously we manage to move into a coordinated rhythm. Or at least that’s what it feels like. His hands move to my back, pressing and guiding me, and then they eventually (or immediately…I have become entirely disconnected from the clock) slide lower, landing firmly on either hip. I turn my head up and, as if guided by some force disconnected from my brain, my own hands move under his shirt, and I feel the sweaty muscles undulating to the music. And then eventually, or immediately, we are kissing. Somewhere, very far back in my brain, moving further even as it tries to make itself heard, a small, deeply unconvincing voice wants me to know that kissing strangers in a pandemic that is fast moving into a worrisome second wave is not responsible behavior. But I am hurtling away from that voice, or it from me, too quickly for it to make any impact. I have been careful for a year. What I am aware of are his hands on my body, slipping further down, and then the small voice disappears entirely. Along with it, as though sucked into a black hole, disappears any awareness of myself from the outside. Gone are all the reflections of myself I have depended on for the last year, what feels like an eternity. Gone is the understanding of myself from the me I see looking back. Gone is the me who existed to so many loved ones only from the neck up, in a square box staring back at me from a screen. I am fully inside myself and only looking out. I don’t care how I appear, only how I feel, and I feel fucking fantastic right now.
Eventually my dance partner and I manage some broken conversation through the music and the kissing and the touching and the groping. He is from Senegal. He likes dancing. I’m from New York. I’m in Paris en vacances pour un mois.
This is the sum total of information we exchange in our time together. I guess his age at around thirty, give or take. We return to our bodies.
Sometime after midnight the band stops playing, and the crowd begins to disperse. From the corner of my eye, I’m vaguely aware of my group packing up our things. There is a sliver of moon high over the now dark water. The black silhouette of Notre-Dame is barely visible against the sky.
My dance partner conveys to me he might be going dancing at another club in the 13th. I’m not going with him. Even through the fog of rosé and the high of our dancing, I shirk from the idea of having to find a new way home, especially through the fog of rosé. This has been delightful, I’m happy to go home. We kiss goodbye. And then again. And again. His hands sliding from my neck, down to my thighs, and then back up again. I slide mine into his hair, pulling him closer, until even after midnight on the Seine we are verging on the obscene. I pull out my phone from where it is still wedged in my bra strap, the screen dripping with my own sweat.
“WhatsApp?” I say to him.
He looks skeptical, but when I hand him the phone, he enters his number.
“Merci.” I kiss him. “I will message,” I say.
He nods. I can tell he’s not convinced. I’m not convinced either, but it feels wonderful to have options.
“His hands were all over you!” Sandra’s friend tells me when I finally return to our blanket and push my swollen feet, socks filthy-black on the bottom now, into my waiting tennis shoes.
Her tone cuts through the fog of ecstasy I am in, suggesting I should…be scandalized? Feel shame? At the very least I should be embarrassed. I recognize it immediately as my own voice coming to greet me from other times and places when I’d admonished friends for doing things that deep down I wished I was doing. Or even just wished I was capable of doing. I don’t know Sandra’s friend at all, but I understand what she really means is: I’m scared to do the thing you just did, and you doing it made me have to think about that.
“That’s exactly where I wanted them to be,” I say with a smile.
This, I think, is what maturity actually means most of the time. It has little to do with growing away from the things that bring us pleasure or joy or just silly fun. It most often just means kindness. Knowing how to give it, to ourselves and others, and also receive it. In this instance, this is not a challenge since I’m so high on the sensation of my entire body being alive I cannot feel anything but good. Beyond good, I feel great. I’m surprised by how powerful I feel. I got what I wanted, or allowed what I wanted to get me.
Nina and I walk home, still swaying to the music. When she drops me off, I tell her to text me as soon as she’s in. We’ve done this so many times together. Upstairs I lie on the floor. Whatever remained of my rational brain a short while ago, the one that thought the dancing and kissing and touching were enough, has gone as silent as the cautionary voice in my head that made its feeble stand earlier. I don’t regret not going dancing somewhere in the 13th, but I’m not done with the night. I swipe through my Fruitz messages to see if there’s potential for some fun chat. There are a slew of messages waiting for me, but immediately I realize I want more. I want the real thing. I decide I should message my dance partner. Even through the high of the evening this feels a bit insane. Does one message a stranger from the dance floor? Isn’t it enough to know I could message him? I consider this for a few minutes. It is not. We’ve all been living in a place of balancing risk against caution for what feels like a long time, and very little feels like enough right now. I open WhatsApp and type:
“Come over?”
The worst that can happen is he says no, I think as I hit send.
The response is immediate.
“Où es-tu?”
I send the address before my brain has a chance to reemerge. I know what I want.
“En route. Dix minutes.”
“Bien,” I type. The sensation of being wanted immediately. I get up to brush my teeth. My stomach churning through the wine at the imminent reality. My phone pings again, and a bolt of worry that he’s changed his mind shoots through me—the disappointment is telling. I’m not drunk or playing; I really do want this. But it’s not him, it’s just Nina telling me she’s home. I send back three thumbs-up emojis. I hesitate. Should I tell her? I should. But I don’t.
When I’m done brushing my teeth, I double-check that the box of condoms I brought with me is in the bedside table. Then I return to the living room and lean out the window. The streets are quiet, it’s close to 2:00 a.m. now. The night air is cool, and the city glows against the low clouds above. I turn to the left and see his figure coming down the street. I watch for a minute, alert with the power that I have summoned this. I have been summoning this for months and now it’s here. I knew what I wanted and I got it. I don’t wait for him to get to the door, or even message. We’ve already done the dance. Literally. I’ve invited him here for one reason. I take the keys, shut the door firmly behind me, and hurry down the stairs, the marble cool against my bare feet, and am at the door when he arrives. This is a New York habit, established from years of living in brownstones with no buzzers. The fact I could have just given him the front door code and simply waited at the door, eliminating any need for stilted small talk, does not register as an option, even though Aarti once told me she gives her door code to every delivery man. Between the restaurants that share access to the lobby, all the occupants of the building, and all the people they invite in, who knows how many people have this code.
In the small time we’ve been apart I’ve already forgotten how tall he is. How broad. The strong smell of too much cologne wafts off him. He follows me up the flights of stairs, not touching me. “One more étage,” I say, thinking the stairs suddenly seem endless. I wonder how this will go. Will it be awkward? No one has seen me naked for a long time. But when I close the door to the apartment, I simply turn to him, and smiling at one another, we immediately pick up where we left off. This time there is no sense of propriety slowing down the removal of my clothes. Which are immediately removed. By him.
As my dress comes off, and then my bra, I consider what my nude, forty-six-year-old body might look like to outside eyes. It does not look like the bodies we are told should be naked. It is not a defying can you believe it body. It has not fared as well as my face. It has shouldered the highs and the plunges of life, of grief, and loss, and confusion, and self-deception, and the reliable joys of food, and the months where not exercising was definitely the healthier option. It is the body of a person who can no longer skate by on no health insurance. Who must follow up on every scan. Who cannot leave home even for one night without tweezers. Who can barely conceive of wearing heels because of the pain they cause my feet.
Should I be concerned? Get under the covers first? Try to angle myself so that the fact one breast currently points in the wrong direction thanks to last year’s biopsy is less noticeable? So that the dimples down the backs of my thighs can only be felt instead of seen?
It doesn’t matter.
None of these questions need answering. The concerns disappear more quickly than they arrive. Now that I’m here, in my body and out of my head, I find I don’t care. I can’t even make myself care. I’m being carried away by all the things that get lost in a two-dimensional world where our eyes are the only way to interact with others, where all our other senses are replaced with an immediate search for “flaws.”
What gets lost in that world: The headiness of another body, the smells, the awkwardness, the vulnerability. Small puffs of air on bare skin. The presence of another person, taking up space, shifting everything in the room so that it takes on a different significance: the lumpy, detestable couch now a helpful place to balance a knee on. The doorframe a solid scaffolding to remain upright. And then, the glorious sensation of just being naked. Skin. So much skin. Hands where there haven’t been hands in…who knows how long. And more skin. More than anything I have missed the contact of skin.
I look up to see him staring at me and I catch that look on his face, the look we are relentlessly told is reserved only for the rarified who have followed the proper regime. Applied the toners and moisturizers and serums in the correct order. Lifted the right amount of weights. Done cardio for the correct amount of time. Excluded the right amount of sugar or fats or meats. Followed each set of new rules as they appear. Restricted themselves. Contorted themselves. Done the work. Remained young. It is the look of a man gazing upon a naked female body they have been invited to partake in. A mix of lust, excitement, gratitude, and relief.
